A nuclear party on the Korean peninsula:
The heated debate in South Korea over redeploying U.S. nuclear weapons on its territory has now reached Washington. A senior delegation of South Korean lawmakers is in town making the case to the Trump administration and Congress that such a move is needed to confront North Korea’s growing nuclear capability and place more pressure on China.
“We are here to ask for redeployment of tactical nuclear warheads in South Korea,” Lee Cheol Woo, the head of the intelligence committee of South Korea’s National Assembly, told me Thursday morning.
Lee is heading a delegation of members of the Liberty Korea Party, the opposition to President Moon Jae-in’s Democratic Party. He is also the chairman of the assembly’s special committee for nuclear crisis response.
Moon told CNN yesterday that he does not agree that tactical nuclear weapons should be reintroduced to South Korea or that Seoul should develop its own nuclear weapons. He warned it could “lead to a nuclear arms race in northeast Asia.” But Lee’s delegation believes that as the North Korea nuclear crisis worsens, a push by the Trump administration or Congress could help persuade Moon’s government to change its position, as it has already done regarding the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system.
If I were Trump, I would announce we cannot contain North Korea, so we will simply arm the South and Japan with sufficient nuclear weaponry to wipe North Korea off the map. Then I would give them all the latest nuke technology and the delivery vehicles, as well as whatever missile defense tech we could afford to let into the wild. Then I would noticeably pull our forces out.
I would assume if things ever went hot, it would fuck up China’s day a lot more than our’s, given the fallout issue and the loss of nuclear hegemony over our allies in the region. My bet would be that within a matter of hours to days China would have solved the North Korean problem, and every enemy of the US would have come to the conclusion President Trump was far too much of a wildman to play any games with him. There is nothing like putting high amygdala on your side to move everyone to a conclusion you want.
It is a high-risk high gain strategy, something I tend to lean toward personally, so it may not be the most responsible path. I would not play it if North Korea were right next door. But if the objective is ending that crisis with China’s help, that would certainly make it happen, and yield ancillary benefits for years to come on the foreign policy front.
Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because high-risk high-gain is the fun way to live life
If China has a pit-bull then America should have one as well. Reciprocity is the foundation of any good relationship.
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